Bunny rabbits in film outside
of Watership Down and Donnie Darko aren’t typically scary. With
the popularization of the Easter Bunny and frequent inclusion in children’s
books or movies, our first reaction to the fuzzy little critters are to pick
them up like cats or dogs. The idea of
making them into monsters for a horror movie is as absurd now as it was in
1972. Only a few years before Monty Python and the Holy Grail unleashed
the hilarity of bloodthirsty yet cute and cuddly killer bunny rabbits, western
television and film director William F. Claxton of Bonanza and Little House on
the Prairie tried his hand at the first and ultimately last science fiction
horror picture of his career: the now infamous and unintentionally funny giant
mutant killer bunny rabbit flick Night of
the Lepus.
Based on the science fiction
novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit
while moving the location from Australia to the barren landscapes of Tuscon,
Arizona, the premise like The Host or
Shin Godzilla mixes a wealth of fact
with fiction. Drawing from a very real
epidemic involving a population explosion of rabbits in Australia which
threatened the livelihood of farmers whose crops were decimated by the furry
creatures, Night of the Lepus like The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
functions as an ecological disaster film with elements of science gone
awry. In this case, an experimental
serum injected into captive rabbits intended to curb the feeding frenzy results
in the small mammals growing into giant beasts with a thirst for human flesh.
Starring an ensemble cast in
suitably thankless roles including Stuart Whitman, scream queen Janet Leigh,
Rory Calhoun and even Star Trek’s
DeForest Kelley, Night of the Lepus bears
the distinction of being that one movie everyone involved in it regards as an
eyesore on their respective resumes. With
stilted performances and often cloying dialogue, nearly every actor looks
trapped in this, collecting a paycheck while taking the piss out of the
production in retrospective interviews. Only
Janet Leigh emerges intact as she would go on to star in a multitude of horror
films throughout her career anyway.
Everyone else seems confused and looking for a nearby exit.
Let’s talk about the film’s
visual effects which are at once cleverly detailed and dumbfounding in their
stupidity. Utilizing a combination of
miniature buildings and cars with domesticated rabbits filmed in slow motion
intercut with snippets of human actors in rabbit costumes for attack scenes, there
are times when the illusion works and other times when it comes off as
hokey. Take for instance a wide shot of
thousands of bloodthirsty bunnies rushing toward the camera, an effective shot
that’s immediately squandered when it cuts to a close-up of an actor dressed in
a rabbit suit for an attack shot. Then
there are the matte lines dividing footage of the cast members with footage of
the impending rabbit stampede with edges that clearly look artificial and stick
out like a sore thumb. The film also,
like Jaws: The Revenge, tries to add
menace by giving the animals a predatory roar, a technique which
unintentionally works against whatever sense of fear or dread the filmmakers
were trying to create.
While some visual effects
are passable, most of the blood and gore effects are obviously red paint thrown
on the actors without the makeup department bothering to add cuts and
scratches. What’s more, Night of the Lepus while exploiting the
locations beautifully thanks to Ted Voightlander’s cinematography sports some
of the jumpiest editing seen in a long while, cutting short potential
exposition and character development. It
doesn’t help that frequent western film composer Jimmie Haskel’s acoustic
guitar driven score can’t help but undermine potential scares at every
turn.
Closer to Irwin Allen’s The Swarm than Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Night of the Lepus now stands as a camp classic whose studio went
so far as to change the title from Rabbits
and supplant elusive posters to hide the mammals from prospective ticket buyers. In a move that was as foolish as it was
telling, promoters inadvertently leaked out the premise by sending out
souvenirs with rabbit foot designs. From
there on, Night of the Lepus was dead
in the marketplace.
Panned by critics upon
release and dying a quiet death at the box office, the film never saw a home
video release of any kind until 2005 when Warner Brothers issued an edited
version on DVD. Curiously, snippets
showed up in Oliver Stone’s 1994 cultural critique Natural Born Killers, playing to a surreal and unnerving effect
never felt in an iota of the running time of the film it was derived from. With the chilling closing image of a
carnivorous rabbit drooling over the camera in Stone’s still relevant kaleidoscopic
epic, who would have thought the film it was lifted from had the reputation of
being so unintentionally hilarious?
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki